Tag: Jeff Bezos

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Jeff Bezos previews his Florida rocket factory

Blue Origin site
The steel structure for Blue Origin’s factory rises from a Florida site. (Blue Origin Photo via Jeff Bezos)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is showing off the “extraordinary progress” being made on the Florida factory where Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital launch vehicle will be built.

“As you can see here, the first steel is now going up,” he wrote today in an email update, accompanied by a picture showing a lattice of girders rising from the construction site near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

The 750,000-square-foot facility is due to open by the end of 2017 and produce New Glenn rockets for Blue Origin’s orbital missions. Test flights are expected to begin by the end of the decade, lifting off from Launch Complex 36 under the terms of a lease from Space Florida.

Meanwhile, Bezos’ Blue Origin venture is also proceeding with its New Shepard suborbital space program. The first full-fledged New Shepard rocket ship was retired after making five successful test flights to the edge of outer space and back.

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Jeff Bezos geeks out over rocket drill machine

Image: EDM drill
Blue Origin’s EDM drilling machine works on a nozzle for the BE-4 rocket engine, currently under development at the company’s production facility in Kent, Wash. “Only 1,000 holes to go,” Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos writes. (Blue Origin Photo)

Building a rocket ship may sound romantic, but there are a lot of nitty-gritty details behind the work – and that’s what Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is celebrating in his latest email about Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine.

Blue Origin, the space venture that Bezos founded back in 2000, is building the engine for use on United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan rocket as well as Blue Origin’s own New Glenn rocket. The plan is to start testing the engine early next year, and start flying the rockets by 2019.

There’s a bit of competitive pressure involved: United Launch Alliance has Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR-1 engine waiting in the wings, just in case Blue Origin and the BE-4 don’t hit their marks.

The BE-4 engine will be fueled by liquid natural gas, unlike the hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine that Blue Origin is using on the suborbital New Shepard rocket ship that it’s testing in West Texas. It’s designed to produce 550,000 pounds of thrust, as opposed to 110,000 pounds of thrust for the BE-3.

That means new technologies have to be employed to build the BE-4 – and today, Bezos called attention to one of those technologies: the automated electrical discharge machining drill, or EDM.

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Where will Jeff Bezos put space colonists?

O'Neill colony
This artist’s conception from the 1970s shows the interior of an O’Neill cylinder. (Credit: NASA)

SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars. Others talk about a Moon Village. But Seattle billionaire Jeff Bezos has a different kind of off-Earth home in mind when he talks about having millions of people living and working in space.

His long-range vision focuses on a decades-old concept for huge artificial habitats that are best known today as O’Neill cylinders.

The concept was laid out in 1976 in a classic book by physicist Gerard O’Neill, titled “The High Frontier.” The idea is to create cylinder-shaped structures in outer space, and give them enough of a spin that residents on the inner surface of the cylinder could live their lives in Earth-style gravity. The habitat’s interior would be illuminated either by reflected sunlight or sunlike artificial light.

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Jeff Bezos explains Blue Origin symbols (and boots)

Blue Origin coat of arms
Blue Origin’s coat of arms is packed with symbolism. (Credit: Blue Origin)

You can’t buy stuff from billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture on Amazon just yet, but just wait: Sixteen years after its founding, Blue Origin offers enough symbols, mottos and mascots to keep the folks who make caps, shirts, coffee mugs – and yes, even cowboy boots – busy for years.

The symbolism adds a sense of tradition to Blue Origin’s 21st-century mission of getting millions of people living and working in space.

So far, the company has conducted five fully successful test flights of its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship, and it’s working on an orbital rocket as well as a super-rocket designed to carry people and payloads beyond Earth orbit.

During last weekend’s Pathfinder Awards banquet at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, Bezos provided a guide to Blue Origin symbology, which we’re supplementing here with some extra bits of background. Before you know it, you’ll be shouting “Gradatim Ferociter” like a pro (preferably as you brandish a Lady Vivamus sword).

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The inside story behind Jeff Bezos’ Star Trek cameo

Lydia Wilson and Jeff Bezos
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos plays a Starfleet official (at right) who assists a rescued spacefarer (played by Lydia Wilson, at left). Credit: Justin Lin via Twitter

When “Star Trek Beyond” comes out on DVD next week, you can freeze-frame on the big-name cameo appearance that zipped past so quickly in the theaters: Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ moment as an alien Starfleet official.

If you missed recognizing him, don’t feel bad. Even Bezos acknowledges that it was a quickie, and the fact that he’s loaded up with face prosthetics doesn’t help.

“You will have to watch very carefully. Do not blink. You will miss me,” he said during Oct. 22’s Pathfinder Awards banquet at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. Bezos was one of the honorees, along with airplane restorer Addison Pemberton.

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Jeff Bezos shares big ideas at Museum of Flight

Jeff Bezos
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos shows off a tortoise cufflink during the Pathfinder Awards banquet at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. The tortoise symbolizes the approach Bezos takes with his Blue Origin space venture. “We believe slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” he says. (Credit: Tania Shepard / Azzura Photography)

Someday, you’ll be printing out a landing pad to guide an Amazon drone to its delivery, or maybe taking a suborbital space trip on a Blue Origin rocket ship, or marveling over the mechanism of a clock designed to run for 10,000 years.

Such were the visions laid out by Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, on Oct. 22 as he received one of this year’s Pathfinder Awards from the Museum of Flight.

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Jeff Bezos compares space to the internet frontier

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos says he plans to spend his “Amazon winnings” on Blue Origin’s effort to build the heavy lifting infrastructure for space ventures. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says he’s trying to do for outer-space ventures what delivery services and the internet did for him: provide the “heavy lifting infrastructure” that will make it possible for entrepreneurs to thrive.

And he’s willing to commit billions of dollars of his “Amazon winnings” to make it so.

Bezos has talked about the parallels between the internet and space commercialization several times before. In April, for example, the subject came up during our fireside chat at the Space Symposium in Colorado.

But at this week’s Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, Bezos made a strong linkage between the work being done at Amazon and the work being done at Blue Origin, the space venture he founded 16 years ago.

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Book recounts how billionaires started a space race

Binnie, Allen and Rutan
Seattle billionaire Paul Allen (center) shakes the hand of SpaceShipOne pilot Brian Binnie in 2004 with rocket plane designer Burt Rutan by his side. (Photo courtesy of Scaled Composites LLC)

Commercial spaceflight seems to be hitting its stride right about now, thanks in part to the launch programs funded by billionaires such as SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos and Vulcan Aerospace’s Paul Allen.

But the spark for that entrepreneurial space was lit two decades ago, and a newly published book reveals how Musk, Bezos and Allen were striking some the matches way back when.

“How to Make a Spaceship,” written by Julian Guthrie, focuses on XPRIZE co-founder Peter Diamandis and his years-long quest to create a $10 million competition for private-sector spaceflight.

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Spaceship’s retirement marked with a tortoise

Blue Origin tortoises
A worker at Blue Origin stencils the seventh and last tortoise onto what Jeff Bezos calls a “hardy and stalwart” New Shepard space capsule. (Credit: Jeff Bezos via Twitter)

After seven launches, Blue Origin’s first New Shepard suborbital space capsule is getting a send-off from the company’s founder, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.

To celebrate Oct. 5’s successful in-flight escape test in West Texas, Blue Origin’s team stenciled “the 7th and final tortoise” onto the capsule’s hatch, Bezos said today in a tweet.

The tortoise serves as the mascot for Bezos’ space venture, apparently in reference to the race between the tortoise and the hare in Aesop’s Fables. “In the long run, deliberate and methodical wins the day,” Bezos explained last month in an email.

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Blue Origin’s spaceship survives fiery flight

Stage separation
The payload capsule on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship lights up its in-flight escape rocket motor and separates from the booster below. (Credit: Blue Origin)

By Alan Boyle and Nat Levy

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is a happy man today, now that the wildest test flight ever conducted by his Blue Origin space venture has ended in the safe landing of an empty crew capsule as well as a fuel-filled rocket booster.

The most important outcome was the survival of the New Shepard spacecraft’s capsule, demonstrating that Blue Origin’s in-flight escape system works. The booster was a bonus.

Bezos said before the launch that he fully expected New Shepard’s booster to go boom. But in a pleasant surprise, the booster made a safe return to the ground, leading to cheers from the audience watching the live stream of the flight at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle. And that’s nothing compared to the celebration that took place at Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site.

“That is one hell of a booster,” Bezos said in a post-landing tweet that was accompanied by a must-see Vine video.

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